2020 vision

I got my eyes tested recently and they said I have 20:20 vision and I thought “what a great way to start a poem!” So here goes…

It’s 2020 and the world is aflame.
President Trump and his faithful sidekick, Nigel Farage
are bunkered down in an air raid shelter,
lords of all they survey:
the charred remains of Anglo-American society
riven by riots and rancour and the mutually assured revenge strikes of Russian nukes raining from the sky.
There’s no more Beijing and Brussels is long gone.
The two men embrace – they’re finally alone

Or it’s 2020 and the world is much the same.
Trump was a fart. A load of hot air
who really might as well have been the Hindenburg.
Amidst scandal and outrage and protests on the streets
this demi-despot returns to nightly to his lonely, lofty reverie.
The muttering retreats
of restless nights booed in the atria of expensive hotels
and of caviar restaurants and oyster shells
This American Psycho keels over one night at dinner
and just like Stalin’s doctor before him, the presidential physician hesitates for a moment too long to touch the great man
and the Trumpian moment is… Gone with the wind.

I don’t really know if either vision of the future is more comforting.
But how could we justify worldviews framed around our nemeses
if in the place of our banished liberal elites
who unwittingly created caliphates around distant oases
these new fascists turn out to be rather… competent? What then?
What if we find out that the world is really rather smitten by a leader
who wants to grab us all by the pussy?

Now, I’ll stop the polemicising for a sec and get one thing straight:
if you’re black or you’re trans or you’re a woman or you’re gay,
if we don’t organise, we could be in for a rocky ride.
The painful reassertion of nation-states in liberalism’s approaching night
Shows the notion that they were vanishing from view was misplaced all along.
Colin Hay says the only thing that was in terminal decline
is how much we expected from the human slime we call politicians
How about the economists too? And the consultants – oh my god, the fucking consultants
People with too much capital, too much power, and too little pity
have disembowelled our welfare states.

We rightly fixate on the racism and misogyny of our societies but another point is obscured:
what we are seeing is a corporate power grab sold as globalisation
to make us feel more cultured.
Let’s unpack how the darkened alleyway our societies have been dragged into and mugged
is being marketed as an up-and-coming street to modernity – after it’s been socially cleansed.
Per Hammarlund calls the hyperglobalists no less than the high priests of neoliberalism
The eroding middle class, social mobility in reverse, the sound of a drawbridge being slammed shut the perverse concentration of wealth and power in the wrinkled hands of dusty white men
The cauldron of anger boils over with protest voting to try to dislodge them.

But I do have to ask: what offends you about protest voting anyway?
‘Why did you vote out?’ The Guardian cries
‘Why did you vote out? Did you believe BoJo’s lies?’
Outcast out voter, when you open your mouth,
do flat northern vowels or long Midlands G’s or Essex glo’als fall out?
Do you read the Sun? Where you come from
is there even anywhere to pick up sushi on the way home?
When you drive through the city do you feel your pulse quicken
does every dark cirrus of burqa-clad women
make your blood pressure rise, just for a minute?

Do you fill your brain with reality TV to banish away another day in a dead-end job
if you even have a job at all? Is that why you voted out?
Do you understand the issues, or do you just get pissed on bad wine?
Have you ever been to Iceland?
No, I – I don’t mean the shop.
Do you think the Poles have come for your job?
Do you stuff biryani into your chubby little gob
while muttering how the country you come from is long gone?
Do you go on holiday in Costa del Sol?
Is Match of the Day your favourite show?
Does an England flag hang from your window?
Do you know you know less than you think that you know
Do you build walls to our windmills as the winds of change blow?

Now that Guardian op-ed was a tad overdone, but I do have something serious to say:
as we intellectually masturbate, the world as we know it is being cast away;
let me explain. I feel like so-called globalisation’s embrace is a fatal bearhug.
Prem Shankhar Jha calls this age the twilight of the nation state. Sounds peaceful, right?
But it’s more of a violent heart attack of the international order,
and with every liberal free trade no tariff barrier promulgation
people are gasping for breath.
Our people! Who in this room has ever been to Oldham, or Clacton, or Hull?
Who feels more at home in Berlin or Paris than they would in the rough parts of their own city?
Where are the intellectuals engaging with the underclass?
People who are “tired of experts” and have said fuck you, fuck your degree and fuck the way
you think you’re better than us since you moved away, you effete bastard.
Our people again.

I’m not being funny, because it really isn’t
but most of us in this room are destined to uphold the unfair society we have a stake in
in this room, we are all legitimately functioning members of the bourgeoisie
and unless we’ve got a dealer, how much do we engage
with the crime and the poverty of this city?
At this point I should probably clear up what I’m saying:
I believe minorities should be protected but I believe the poor are the most oppressed of all
I also believe that communities need to be able to communicate
I was shocked Clinton lost. I favour independence for the Scots. I voted for Brexit.

You’ve probably heard someone say that out voters are uneducated
Okay. You can hold the failings of an education system that entrenches privilege
Against those very people in the underfunded crumbling schools staffed by demoralised teachers. If you want.

You hear it a lot that out voters are afraid, and maybe that’s right
fear is xenophobia’s natural price
but maybe the towns they call home going into decline
is a good and proper reason to be kept awake at night.
Maybe they hate the selectively gentrifying middle classes,
the hipsters and management consultants
pricing them out of their homes, outsourcing their jobs, and robbing them of their voices
Maybe we should be, in a way, heartened by popular anger.
If Goldman Sachs’s vampire squid sucking dry the Black Country, or the Welsh Valleys, was accepted without a fight
What would that say about people’s belief in their agency to create change?

And for what it’s worth, I don’t think that identikit town centres with a Costa and a Primark and other global brands
Is enough recompense when a nation of people wants its self-worth back
You might retort that nations are imagined. An artificial group
That’s cool, I’ve read Benedict Anderson too. But your house is artificial and you probably quite like that, don’t you?

Tétreault and Lipschutz contend that the emergence of corporations, many with economies larger than countries and the capacity for violence creates legitimate challengers to the state monopoly of power.
The swollen bodies of these corporations weigh too heavily on the old foundations of our societies
and the social contracts we had are sinking into the mud
just as the palaces of Venice one day could.

To fight back against those who hold power has always been a radical act.
We know that our privileges and oppressions overlap and we should remember that fact.
I am pissed off that TTIP and CETA would give multinational corporations who pay no tax more rights than me and you.
I care more about people than I care about the EU.
Does the brain drain of southern and eastern Europe’s best and brightest westwards
not fill you with regret?
As a Portuguese lawyer serves your latte
and a Romanian academic drives your Uber
do you literally even care?

Will you open your eyes if I show you photos of the refugees Merkel invited
and then marooned on Greek islands as she prioritised a political project over human lives?
Do you need me to tell you that the troika has drained the Grecian corpse of life,
oblivious to the historical irony of the birthplace of democracy being pushed past the brink
to satisfy the investor demands of German and French banks?

I will admit that the decision to vote for Brexit was an agonising one,
but believe I made the most informed decision I could at the time
If you care about democracy. If you care about accountability.
How can you be so appalled with people rebelling against authority?
The guillotine of neoliberal shock doctrine goes for the poor:
And that’s woman, man, and everything in between
every antipode against which we construct our identity.
Our economic system is broken. We need a better one
but I hold this truth to be self-evident: the world that we live in shall remain a nationalised one.